I poked through the archives but didn't see any answers to this  
question.


We have many databases that we replicate via slony (200+ GB each).   
The problem is that the initial COPY is slow, and a single process.   
We have a faster, lower level mechanism to clone an entire database  
much faster, thus I would like to disable the initial truncate/COPY of  
slony during initialization.  This approach would require a small  
downtime to perform the last sync/quiesce, but our application can  
tolerate that.  Essentially I would guarantee that the databases are  
in sync, exactly, using a different mechanism (in this case disk level  
snapshots).  We use this mechanism currently to clone databases, but  
it would be nice to extend it for slony setup.  I looked through the  
source, and it seems possible to change things to support this type of  
initialization.

The process I am thinking of is something like:

start disk sync on A to B
shutdown A
sync last bits from A to B
startup A on different port ( no traffic except me )
startup B on different port ( no traffic except me )
subscribe set in slony w/o TRUNCATE/COPY
restart A on prod port
restart B on prod port
start slon processes


Thanks
Kenny Gorman
DBA
www.hi5.com